It is perhaps fitting that Marilyn Minter‘s airy studio is housed in a rather unassuming building in the Garment District that could easily pass for your average office complex. At 67, the fashion-focused artist finds herself in the middle of a whirlwind tour for her first retrospective, aptly-named

Marilyn Minter, Not in These Shoes (2013).Enamel on metal, 108 x 162 inches Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Marilyn Minter On Glamour

Marilyn Minter On Glamour, Diane Arbus, and Why Envy is the Worst Emotion

It is perhaps fitting that Marilyn Minter‘s airy studio is housed in a rather unassuming building in the Garment District that could easily pass for your average office complex. At 67, the fashion-focused artist finds herself in the middle of a whirlwind tour for her first retrospective, aptly-named “Pretty/Dirty,” which opened at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in April and will arrive at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on September 18. Later stops will be in Orange County and in Brooklyn in 2016. Despite her recent fame, Minter’s road to success hasn’t always been easy.

Following the calamity, Minter refined her aesthetic. Decades later, she is no less interested in posing the big, sometimes ugly questions about the ways in which women are perceived in the world, but she’s posing them in a less aggressive way. Of course, we’re still talking about a woman who recently released an artist book filled with photographs of women’s pubic hair, so take that claim with a grain of salt.

In person, Minter is warm and easy to converse with. Her statements feel unpracticed, although after 40 years in the art world, it’s hard to believe that’s the case. Even the stories you may have heard before—like the one in which a young Diane Arbus visits the University of Florida photography department and praises the work of an even younger Minter—feel fresh when she retells them, with a smile on her fire engine red lips and a slightly mischievous, knowing glimmer in her eye.

Her mother’s troubled beauty has been a lasting influence on Minter, but her inquiry into the trappings of womanhood began before she could even comprehend what that meant. She still has a series of pencil drawings from her childhood that she sketched inside a copy of Andersen’s Fairy Tales. The drawings show a line of little schoolgirls with perky bows in their voluminous hair, a busty woman in a form-fitting evening gown, and a single high-heeled shoe attached to a shapely, disembodied leg. Minter suspects she was nine when she made them, because she remembers receiving a copy around that age. “I didn’t have a lot of paper to draw on, so I would draw on these flyleaves and books,” she recalls.

“When I think about my work, I mostly think about the paradox that goes on when you look at these images,” Minter says. “How much pleasure glamour gives us but at the same time, how we know we’ll never look like that, and even [models] don’t look like that. There’s this constant distortion that’s happening between all of us—men and women—there’s a sense of failure. But at the same time, all of this pleasure.”

this text is Honorbly extracted from news.artnet.com by Hoomartgallery.com.